Photography

The Search - by Freddie Hare

How many times trying does it take to find what you're looking for?

An adventure opportunity arose when my girlfriend invited me to join her on holiday with the family. As a coast kid, I always loved to pursue something with a little water, and a little thrill - so Portugal was a great place to let loose.

Straight off the plane we managed to grab a taxi and cram in two 9ft longboards and 5 shortboards which was an over-dramatic start for our journey to the south. After at least 2 hours of this hectic, hot and stuffy car journey full of smells (which I can’t say from who and where but it wasn’t pleasant) we finally made it to the villa (which was PIMPING!)

Not messing around, Lucie (my girlfriend) & I took full advantage of the van and drove off to explore the coastline. It was Christmas come early, just pure waveporn. We were gifted with a lovely 3-4ft wave with not a soul in the water.... WINNING!

After a week of constant surfing and terrible tan lines, I thought we should give the shoulders a rest and find some of Portugal’s hidden gems.

There's only a certain amount of minutes I can sit still for... I dragged Lucie and the others on a hunt for a possible cliff jump I had been shown by a friend of mine on Instagram. It took us three attempts to find this cliff, I was orienteering from google maps which was a little unconvincing to the others as we were scrambling over rocks and bushes in the blistering midday heat.

Finally on our third attempt to find this place, we got there. We began the descent down and placed our valuables in a safe area. You know when you show someone an image and it just doesn’t do the place justice? Well that was very true in our case, this jump was fucking HUGE!

I made my way down to an obvious ledge to scout where we could jump in and exit safely. There was nothing visible and it was a huge 50ft+ drop into a dark cave at high tide. Lucie looked at me as if I was mad, so we called it off and headed back to our safe cosy villa to indulge ourselves with wine and pasta for the night.

It was too big and sketchy, we needed at least a warm up jump before attempting such a sickening drop. A couple days on from our failed attempts, we decided to take a boat tour around the coastline of southern Portugal (Sagres). What happened next was bloody typical; the captain was telling us about all these amazing places that we could jump from and the first jump just so happened to be the one we had been looking for! How fucking annoying is that?

The end of the tour we headed round the bay to find the big ass jump we had failed the previous week. I explained to the captain how we had attempted to jump this and he laughed and said “You're just jumping to your death, there’s no way out - once you're in, you're in”.

How very happy we all were that we didn’t have the bollocks to go through with this idiotic jump, as this would have been a very different story. We opted for a smaller, safer one instead.